George Simpson: I have spent the better part
of the last 15 years defending cookie-setting
and tracking to help improve advertising. But
it is really hard when the prosecution
presents the evidence, and it has ad industry
fingerprints all over it -- every time. in Suicide
By Cookies (via Doc
Searls Weblog and Mozilla
Privacy Blog)

Joshua Koran: The
Real Costs of Cookie-Blocking. This
inadvertently centralizes consumer activity to just a
few players, which according to privacy advocates would
help lead to the very "Big Brother" centralized
database of consumer activity that they are trying to
prevent.

Rebecca Waber: When
Ads Get (Too) Personal. As media — and
the advertising seen on it — become more focused
on smaller groups of individuals, we see less of
the same advertising content as other people do. And
that's a potential blow to advertisers for several
important reasons:....

Richard Stacy: Why
social media is a dangerous concept. Social
media only really works on the basis of speaking to
small groups of people or individuals. It hardly ever
gives you the scale or reach we assume is associated
with the term media.

Alan Schulman: Algorithms
Don't Feel, People Do. This balance between
medium and message has largely been lost, as we seem
more seduced by the algorithms — the containers and
software solutions for delivering messages to devices
— than the evolution or effectiveness of them.

Dax Hamman: Why
retargeting is fundamentally broken. Do we not
recognize that all that advertising we see in
magazines, on TV or hear on the radio is influencing
our decisions? And yet under the digital model of last
touch, all of that value and influence is simply
ignored.

Steve Smith: Is
'Do Not Track' And Opt-Out Already Impacting Audience
Value And Pricing?The report contends that
this increase in the share of users either without
cookies or without third-party data is likely a
result of enhanced public awareness of do-not-track
and opt-out mechanisms. As browsers like Mozilla’s
Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer make
the do-not-track flag or cookie blocking the default
modes,this share is likely to rise.

Mary Hodder and Elizabeth Churchill: Lying
and Hiding in the Name of Privacy. A large
percentage of individuals employ artful dodges to
avoid giving out requested personal information online
when they believe at least some of that information
is not required. These dodges include hiding personal
details, intentionally submitting incorrect data,
clicking away from sites or refusing to install phone
applications. This suggests most people do not want
to reveal more than they have to when all they want
is to download apps, watch videos, shop or participate
in social networking.

Dan Hon: 2p
– The tyranny of digital advertising.
Ultimately, digital display advertising is boring
and suffers from a glut of oversupply. This is why we
have a pseudo holy war going on between the display
advertising folk and the native advertising folk:
because people ignore interruptive display advertising
and pay attention to interesting content.

Mozilla Blog: Personalization
with Respect. Mozilla aspires to enable
personalization—the customization of ads, content,
recommendations, offers and more — that doesn’t
rely on the user being in the dark about who has
access to that information, and with whom that
information is shared.

Ken Doctor: The
newsonomics of climbing the ad food chain.
Publishers describe their digital ad woe
with these terms: “price compression,”
“bargain-basement ad networks,” and “death
of the banner ad.” Each describes a world
of hyper-competition in digital advertising
— a world of almost infinite ad possibility
and unyielding downward pricing pressure. (via Street
Fight)